This proposal requests funds in partial support of the 2005 FASEB Summer Research Conference on "Bioactive Lysolipids in Health and Disease" to be held from June 11-16, 2005 at the Snowmass Village Resort, Colorado. We are seeking funds specifically to pay the travel and registration costs of a select groups of beginning, minority, female and overseas-based investigators who have been invited to make research presentations at the conference. This conference provides a unique forum for the presentation and discussion of recent research progress in the area of bioactive lysolipid mediators. This will be the third biannual conference on this topic. The first meeting was attended by -100 scientists, the second by -150 and we anticipate that applications to attend our upcoming meeting will exceed the conference limit of 200 participants. The primary reason for this rapidly increasing level of interest in our conference is that it is now clear that this family of lipids, which include lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) and related molecules, play critical roles in physiology and pathophysiolgy that rival and in some cases exceed those of peptide growth factors. The bioactive lipids that form the focus of our conference have established functions in the etiology, diagnosis and management of neurological and cardiovascular diseases, immunologic diathesis, ischemia reperfusion injury, protection from ionizing radiation and cancer. Novel therapeutics targeting lysolipids and their receptors have demonstrated efficacy in the treatment of several of these diseases. Publications in this field have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s with approximately 500 relevant articles published in the present year. The NIH supports approximately 130 active research projects in the area of our conference through funds administered by all of the major institutes, primarily the NCI, NHLBI NIAID and NIGMS. The primary objective of our meeting is to bring together and faciliate discussion, collaboration and exchange of reagents and ideas between researchers with converging interests in this exciting, growing, globally active and medically relevant research field.

R13HL082350

2005-08-01

2006-07-31